I don’t normally post many “mashups” but Prague 360 is to beautiful to pass up.

Jeffrey Martin and his brother David have created some high quality views on some of the cities, and they use the Google Maps API as the platform to show the content.

If you head over to Prague, you will see that along with the usual normal map, satellite, and hybrid options, there are gigapixel versions for Winter and Spring. Jeffrey finds a high spot where he sets up his camera and takes lots of photos of the area. These pictures are with a very nice, zoomed in lens, and then he stitches them together to make one REALLY large photo.

Then David takes the image over to matlab world and cuts it up into tiles for the various zoom levels on the map. Now, on the map, when you click on one of the gigapixel options the new tiles are overlayed.

You will also notice that on the various mapping views not all of the points of interest are shown. Instead, they use the MarkerManager component to package items that are close together as one point on the map.

You will also notice that the right hand side has 360 closeup views of the given areas. We all remember the original “VR” versions of this with poor quality. These are definitely a 2007 version. One of the use cases for the site is for people to check out real estate. With this level of quality, you really can get a good view of the property, easily enough to narrow it down.